Thursday, April 14, 2011

Farsi and Tamil available in Panoramio.com

News:

Farsi and Tamil are now available in Panoramio

We just published a help article explaining how you can help making Panoramio available in your language

We had plenty of time two weeks ago during the Google Geo User Summit to discuss with our top users in Asia about localization of Panoramio. One of the topics we discussed was “Community Translations vs Professional Translations”. That conversation proofed that we have followed the right direction by allowing Community Translations. When the product is translated professionally languages get prioritized following a criteria that is not always the one our users are interested in. When the product is translated by the community, it is the community who decides which languages are prioritized. This allows to have small languages available in Panoramio while this would be very difficult with professional translations, plus quality increases as the ones who use the product are the ones deciding the words to use on the interface.

It is for this reason that I wanted to write this post, to let you all know that we will continue our development with community translations. I want to thank the members of Panoramio that helped so far with this task. They are all listed in the Panoramio Team’s page.

Another decision we took in the summit was to make Farsi available during a testing period to collect feedback from the Iranian community. Our UI is currently not ready to support Right to Left languages like Farsi, but we have agreed with the Iranian Community that we would try launching Farsi, a Right to Left language in our Left to Right UI to see how it looks. This is available as of now, so please let us know your thoughts regarding this language. Should we keep it or should we remove it?